1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus for managing data in association with a user, and a control method of the information processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a document managing system has been known, as a data managing system, in which image data generated by reading an original document with a network apparatus and transmitted from the network apparatus is stored as a document. FIG. 17 is a diagram showing a configuration of the conventional document managing system. The document managing system is provided with a document managing server 202, a document transfer device 204, an image reading apparatus 203, and a client PC 205 which are connected through a LAN 201 (for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2003-085178).
The image data read by the image reading apparatus 203 is temporally transmitted to the document transfer device 204 by using a file transfer protocol such as FTP. The document transfer device 204 transmits the image data received from the image reading apparatus 203 to the document managing server 202 according to the user settings. A unique protocol is often used to transfer a document from the document transfer device 204 to the document managing server 202.
The document managing server 202 stores and manages the data received from the document transfer device 204 in association with the user. The document stored and managed on the document managing server 202 can be manipulated with document managing client software running on the client PC 205. In recent years, the progress in the WEB technology has led to the increasing emergence of a system provided with a function for manipulating the document managing server 202 with a WEB browser running on the client PC 205.
There also exists a document managing system which directly transmits the image data read by the image reading apparatus 203 to the document managing server 202 (for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2005-174055). In this case, a unique protocol or a general-purpose file transfer protocol such as the FTP is used to transfer the image data. In such a case, to manage the received image data in association with the user in the document managing server 202, user authentication information for accessing the document managing server 202 is generally used as authentication information for transferring the image data.
However, the above conventional document managing systems have the following disadvantages. In case of a document managing system that requires the document transfer device, the document transfer device must be installed, and settings must be made for transferring the image data transmitted from the image reading apparatus to the document managing server in association with the user of the document managing server. These place a burden on an administrator.
In addition, while the document managing server is a final storing destination for the read image data, the read image data will first be transmitted to the document transfer device when the image reading apparatus is operated. Therefore, there is a problem that the storing destination and a transfer destination of the image are different from each other.
Further, the document transfer device needs to keep the authentication information for connecting to the document managing server. Thus, managing authentication information in a plurality of locations may increase the possibility of leaking the information, so that this is unfavorable for security.
When the unique protocol is used to transfer the read image data in a document managing system which does not need the document transfer device, it is necessary to provide the image reading apparatus with such a protocol. This means that when the general-purpose protocol is used to transfer the image data and such a general-purpose protocol is not secure, user authentication information for accessing the document managing server may be leaked to a third party on the network.
On the other hand, when a secure general-purpose protocol is used, it becomes necessary to provide a security infrastructure such as PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) and to make settings for it. These place a burden on an implementer and an administrator. When the authentication information is stored in a storage device in the image reading apparatus to simplify the transmission of the read image data, the authentication information of the document managing server may be leaked if it is not appropriately stored for safekeeping.
For security measures, a password for the authentication information in the document managing server is often stored in the form of a one-way hash of the password such as SHA-1 and MD5. In this case, the one-way hash is calculated for the password inputted by the user, and when the calculated results are matched, the authentication to the document managing server succeeds. In such a system, when setting the authentication information to the document managing server to be stored in the document transfer device and the image reading apparatus, the user needs to input the authentication information to the document managing server. This places a burden on an administrator and the user.